Meeting News - December 21, 2009 - (Page 19)

Meeting People By Seth Harris sharris@meetingnews.com BTN Honors Deutsche Bank’s Debbie Dayton’s Meetings Effort Deutsche Bank global head of travel-related services Debbie Dayton recently was named 2009 International Travel Manager of the Year by MeetingNews sister publication Business Travel News, largely for her company’s two-year strategic meetings management reengineering process. Deutsche Bank worked with meetings technology provider StarCite to develop new electronic meetings processes, including budgeting, requests for proposals, reporting, reconciliation and data modules, that have become part of StarCite’s meetings management platform. The enhancements now are in use not only by 45 Deutsche Bank meeting planners and administrative assistants worldwide, but also in hundreds of other major corporations. In 2007, under a procurement-led initiative, the Frankfurt-based ﬁnancial services company, which had a $495 million global travel program in 2008 that operated in 32 countries and served more than 78,000 employees, began compiling its fragmented meeting planning and procurement operations in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Within one year, Deutsche Bank was operating its new meetings program in those three countries, which comprise the vast majority of its meetings spending. Following those quick but large wins in March, the company made its first strategic meetings management inroads in Asia/Paciﬁc by deploying the technology in Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore. The bank now is rolling out some components in India, often a difﬁcult market to establish meetings management processes, and is integrating some reservations processes in South America into the meetings technology. The measured approach to deploying the technology comes from the complexities of managing a global program, said Dayton. “Everywhere we go with anything we do in any country, we have to cover all data privacy, all legal, look at disaster recovery and make sure we have redundant systems,” she said. “There is a whole protocol internally that we have to follow with everything we do.” The travel and meetings team, including vice president and project lead for the meetings pro- Debbie Dayton, 2009’s top int’l travel mgr. gram Shawn Radek, in 2007 began the process of replacing its spreadsheet-based meetings management toolbox. The bank, a member of StarCite’s development advisory group, worked with StarCite to revamp the technology company’s sparsely used budget analyzer tool. The enhanced tool now provides the projected total cost of an event, including transportation spending, before the meeting approval process. Deutsche Bank preloads the tool bian- nually with average negotiated hotel rates, airfares and other metrics, including average food and beverage costs. Meeting planners populate the guest ﬁelds and other parameters and can compare costs across cities. For cities where the bank does little or no business, StarCite populates ﬁelds with average costs from its database. In total, Deutsche Bank contributed about 40 features to StarCite’s standard platform, primarily around the expansion of the budgeting and reconciliation processes. Melding transportation costs into the equation provided a new level of budget evaluation. The expanded system now has more than 200 line items, which deliver pre- and post-event reporting from multiple views and can be broken down to a cost-per-attendee basis. The technology offers Deutsche Bank instant reporting across business lines, corporate hierarchical levels and regions. As more comparative data becomes available, the new level of reporting will enable Deutsche Bank to measure the return on its meetings investment. That investment stood at $132 million in 2009, which, with the bank’s $368 million in global transient travel spending, offers strong negotiating leverage. Meanwhile, the travel team currently is recording the carbon footprints of its top travelers in each country “to try and raise awareness on the impact we are having on our environment as we travel,” Dayton said. As in the United States, the company is deploying in the United Kingdom a pre-trip approval system that integrates cost and carbon emissions data for managers to consider before signing off on a trip. In the bank’s preferred booking channels, green suppliers are highlighted to direct business their way, Dayton said. The meetings team is working with the company’s corporate social responsibility team to identify the 10 most critical green criteria to evaluate in the RFP process. r Please e-mail meetings industry personnel announcements to cdavis@meetingnews.com. www.meetingnews.com December 21, 2009 MeetingNews 19 Gwen Adler http://www.meetingnews.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Meeting News - December 21, 2009

Meeting News - December 21, 2009
Contents
Newsmaker
Viewpoint
Meetings Spotlight
Association Watch
Construction Cites
Event Profile
Meeting People
Dateline: Mississippi
Dateline: Las Vegas
West Regional
Planner’s Choice Awards
Travel Dashboard

Meeting News - December 21, 2009